Transatlantic Zeppelin: An afternoon of mushrooms, fairies, and secret doors

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April 29, 2005

An afternoon of mushrooms, fairies, and secret doors

While my friend was in town this week, we went down to New York's Chelsea neighborhood for a gallery crawl. (It started at a liquor store, but that's not relevant to discuss!) There were two artists that particularly impressed us.

The first is Barton Benes, who specializes in arranging small objects. HIV positive, Benes is known for a controversial exhibit featuring syringes filled with his blood. His "Petitisfours", currently avaialable, features HIV drugs arranged to look like the small French dessert.

Benes's "Souvenirs" (2003) was a particularly whimsical arrangement of several dozen countries' currency fashioned by papier-mâché into small objects typical of the country, each displayed in a cell on the wall. For example, Latvian Lats were fashioned into a red/orange mushroom (since mushrooms are very popular in Latvia), while Russian roubles became a vodka bottle. Some, like the Latvian mushroom, were more inventive than others, such as an Icelandic krona fashioned into a snowflake. Others made a political statement, such as US dollars turned into a cowboy hat. Although simple, the work provided us with several minutes of speculating why the artist chose particular shapes for particular countries.

The second artist was Dean Byington, who has his first one-man exhibit in NYC at Leslie Tonkonow gallery. Byington produces only 5-10 works a year, each large enough to fill a small wall. Upon first seeing a work like Blue Landscape or Signal, one might think, "boring, next gallery!" My friend had better eyes than me, and she quickly found an imaginary fairy-tale world depicted in the art. Hidden within lush forest landscapes are secret doors, lanterns, mushrooms, signposts, pits that look like bees' eyes, and a parade of small imaginary insects walking upright. We spent several minutes picking out the imaginative but tiny fairy-tale characters in each wall-sized artwork trying to determine the story told in the details. When we visited, Signal was available at $14,000, which means I won't soon be buying it to grace my future daughter's bedroom. Perhaps Byington could produce a few smaller versions? I'll be first in line to buy. (UPDATE: No, mom, nobody is pregnant by me.)

Posted by adrianjo at April 29, 2005 12:00 AM